Esquire's 18 Best Bars in America

In 2005, my editors at Esquire came up with the idea of putting together a list of America's best bars—not the best new cocktail bars or sports bars or brunch bars or whatever, but the best bars irrespective of type. As the magazine's Drinks Correspondent, I was to be the pointman on the project. What I didn't know was that I'd be reporting from the front lines of a revolution in how and where Americans drink.

Back then, if you knew where to go in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and a few other towns, you could find a place where the young man or woman behind the bar would carefully crack the ice for your manhattan or El Presidente, precisely measure the ingredients and give them an elegant stir, strain the cocktail into a beautiful glass, and then charge you ten dollars. That ten dollars would not get you bar snacks, a well-stocked jukebox, TV, Big Buck Hunter, darts, a greasy egg sandwich, or a basket of fries. There weren't many of these places, but there were just enough to satisfy the rare cocktail enthusiast.

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Today, this kind of bar numbers in the thousands, and you can find them in just about every town in the country. Boise. Knoxville. Indianapolis. Springfield—all of the Springfields. Everywhere. In New York and San Francisco and other places where real estate is expensive, the venerable, homey, and very human old dives are closing and these are opening instead. But here's the thing: This may be a case of the blood of heroes watering the tree of revolution. Because there's something going on in these new bars, particularly in the best of them, that needs more attention.

For one thing, these places are full. People are paying double to drink in them, and they're not outraged. They're coming back, over and over. They're putting their phones away (well, mostly), forgetting about the game, doing their best to act sober. (In my years of visiting these joints, I've rarely seen anybody visibly intoxicated—tipsy, sure; drunk, uncool.) The bartenders, their mustachioed, inked hipsterdom aside, are generally studious and hardworking (if perhaps too devoted to making things by hand that really don't need to be). All of this while the media and the political class are hyperventilating about the irreparable decline of America. But when you're seated on a barstool, whether it's in Seattle or Sarasota, Salem or San Ysidro, that's not what it looks like. From there, it looks like these bars are the anti-Internet, bringing (young) people together and rebuilding a society, one martini or beer back at a time, that has kind of come apart at the seams. Viva la revolución!

Why you're here: Though top restaurateurs have opened bars before, none have succeeded quite as brilliantly as Danny Meyer of Union Square Cafe and, of course, Shake Shack fame. Meyer's joints have always gone easy on the chefy shenanigans and hardcore on service and hospitality. At Meyer's Porchlight, that means personable, clever bartenders mixing balanced, straightforward drinks. It also means superior bar food. Plus, there's great music and a well-stocked game room.

The bar at Porchlight.

What you're having: A Gun Metal Blue.

Recipe by Nicholas Bennett of Porchlight

Shake and strain into a chilled coupe:

• 1 ½ oz mezcal

• ½ oz blue curaçao

• ¼ oz peach brandy

• ¾ oz fresh lime juice

• ¼ oz bitter cinnamon syrup*

Garnish with a flamed orange peel.

Cocktail: Porchlight

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*To make bitter cinnamon syrup, take four sticks of whole cinnamon and break them apart. Lightly toast them in a pan until they become aromatic. Add four cups granulated sugar, two cups water, and 30 grams gentian root and simmer on low until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat, let cool, strain, and refrigerate.

Why you're here: Even though Good Luck bills itself primarily as a restaurant, its bartenders have been making craft cocktails since 2008 at the big square bar right in the center of the room. It's loud, boisterous, busy. It's also excellent, even down to the (okay, now cliché) on-tap Moscow Mule, which they liven up, unconventionally, with a splash of Scotch ale.

What you're having: A New York Sour.

Cocktail: New York Sour

Recipe by Chuck Cerankosky of Good Luck

In a shaker, muddle 3 Demerara sugar cubes and ¾ oz fresh lemon juice. Add ice along with 2 oz bourbon and shake some more. Strain the cocktail, discard the ice, add an egg white, shake, and then strain again into an ice-filled old-fashioned glass. Using the back of a spoon, float a thin layer of dry red wine (malbec is good) on top of the drink.

Why you're here: Real cocktails, good food, regulars who know the art of conversation: Believe it or not, this is Jersey City, a short tunnel and a thousand miles away from Lower Manhattan. Extra points for the Dullboy's literary theme and witty atmosphere—the back wall of loosely hung books is particularly amusing.

Why you're here: It's been around since 1950 and kinda looks like it, a hard-ridden reminder of when California represented The Good Life—As Seen on TV. There's a gas grill, right in the middle of the bar, for cooking your own steaks; a piano and a jukebox; and a menu filled with stiff cocktails.What you're having: An Esquire martini (gin, please, up).

Why you're here: I do my best to exercise good—okay, goodish—judgment when I'm touring barrooms, but every once in a while, a gear slips a tooth and dosages get miscalculated. Whitey's is a slipped tooth, a place I was introduced to by some Boston bartenders. I have dim memories of having an excellent time—doing big shots of Irish whiskey, writing on the walls, rolling dice, joking around with the regulars.

Why you're here: With its low-key elegance and intelligent focus on the fundamentals, Teardrop Lounge is a linchpin in America's craft-cocktail bar scene and one of the pioneers that spurred a revolution.

What you're having: A Hell or High Water.

Recipe by Sean Hoard and Daniel Shoemaker of Teardrop Lounge

Combine in a shaker:

• p1 ½ oz Irish whiskey

• ½ oz dry vermouth

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

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• ½ oz egg white

• ¼ oz Bénédictine

• ¼ oz peach liqueur (preferably Combier crème de pêche de vigne)

• ¼ oz honey mix (2 parts honey to 1 part water)

Shake well without ice. Add ice, shake again, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Extract the oils from an orange rind and discard.

Why you're here: Japp's opened in 1879 as a wig shop and in time became a fancy one: all carved wood and stained glass. Then its brick-and-stone neighborhood fell on hard times until 2011, when Molly Wellmann, the Bar Queen of Cincinnati, discovered the place, restored it, and introduced it as this civilized cocktail bar.

Why you're here: Because this new New Orleans favorite gives a word like distressed a good name. A few years back, when the owners of Cure, the city's seminal craft-cocktail bar (Best Bars, 2011), took over a vodka-and-absinthe bar a block from the old French Market, they had the good sense to rip out the features and expose the old bones lying beneath. They continued to exploit that good sense by stocking the place with rum, as if to remind us that should you sail southeast from New Orleans, the first place you'll hit is Havana. Add in Caribbean-inspired bar food and bartenders who enjoy their work, and you have a bar that's far easier to walk into than out of.

Cocktail: Cane Street Swizzle

What you're having: A Cane Street Swizzle.

Recipe by Colin Decarufel of Cane & Table

In a hollowed-out pineapple, combine:

• 1 ½ oz rum

• ¾ oz fresh lime juice

• ½ oz cane syrup ¼ oz falernum

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Swizzle with a swizzle stick and garnish with a generous bouquet of mint.

Why you're here: This old German market and smokehouse has good German lagers on tap, fresh kegs, and clean lines. A liter stein costs all of eight dollars, and the crowd is friendly and lively. If it ain't technically a bar, it's as good as one but with better food. (If you like German food, this is as good as it gets; if you don't, it's still good.)

Why you're here: Manhattan's Upper East Side has nothing but museums and cultural institutions—the sort of places you go to and, upon exiting, say quietly to yourself, "You know what would be nice right now?" The answer, invariably, is a cocktail. At Seamstress, you'll get an excellent one and enjoy a rollicking atmosphere, and if the bar's original creations don't appeal, choose from the list of fifty all-time classics.

Why you're here: It's the only dive bar in America obsessively devoted to presidential history—and it's got great drinks, too. Occupying an 1870s brick livery stable in a handsome old-house part of town, it's draped in flags, paneled in plaques and prints, and strewn with presidential kickshaws. Plus, it offers a deep bench of local brews.

Why you're here: There's nothing fancy about the bar itself—draft beer, cheap whiskey, highballs. But the jukebox! Put it this way: A book accompanies it, listing the contents of each of the home-burned CDs. Soul, R&B, funk, jazz: If those words don't appeal to you and the thought of drinking five-dollar shot-and-beer specials in the company of soul fanatics exerts no magnetic pull on you, go elsewhere.

What you're having: A five-dollar combo: a shot of whiskey and a can of beer.

Why you're here: Have you ever wanted to drink in an 1890s London Tube station converted into an illicit gin distillery, with a classic Victorian "gin palace" in the back? Here's your chance.

Mixing a drink at Whitechapel.

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Where you're sitting: The front bar has the best decor, with real Tube tiles and custom faux-Victorian wallpaper with—what else!—a gin theme.

What you're having: Gin—Whitechapel has almost four hundred of 'em—perhaps in the form of a Dutch Nemesis or kopstootjes: little shots of chilled genever (Dutch gin) sipped sans hands from the bar with a short beer back.

Recipe by Alex Smith of Whitechapel

Combine in a shaker:

• 1 oz genever

• ¾ oz kümmel (a sweet Baltic liqueur)

• ½ oz pineapple gum syrup

• ¾ oz fresh lime juice

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

• ice

Shake and strain into a deep chilled coupe and top with 2 oz chilled sparkling wine.

Why you're here: It's a great dive bar, and great dive bars always have something epic about them, some surprising something that makes you shake your head as you drink your drink. At this substantial redbrick row house turned bar, it's the replica Sistine Chapel on the spacious ceiling—there's God and Adam and their fingers; there's Y-W-H creating this and that; there's Adam and the Mrs. getting the bum's rush; there's ol' Noah, drunk again.

What you're having: A Natty Boh, a shot of Pikesville, and religious thoughts.

Why you're here: Because you'll stand in the little smokers' corral in front of Shelby's and you'll look around—all the way around—and you'll remember that Denver used to be an ornery frontier town, full of crust and character. And then you'll step back inside and call for another round, and the bartender will tell you to shut up and wait your damn turn like a human being.

Why you're here: Before it was BrooklynTM, this borough was an unmoored chunk of the Rust Belt right on the East River, and Quarter Bar has all the Rust Belt virtues. Founded in 2007, it's homey and unpretentious and feels like it's connected to the neighborhood. But they can twist you up a fancy New York-style cocktail without blinking an eye or looking at you funny.

What you're having: A daiquiri, because they do them right.

Whom to ask for: David Moo, and tell him we said hello.

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THE HALL OF FAME

BY ALL RIGHTS, FIRST PLACE on any list of the best bars of the twenty-first century should go to Milk & Honey, founded in New York in 1999 by the late and much-lamented Sasha Petraske, who did more than anybody else to establish the parameters for the modern cocktail bar. Unfortunately, it closed a couple years ago, and there's no point in us listing a place you can't visit. That sends us—and, we hope, you—to Pegu Club. In our first Best Bars feature, we singled out this modern New York classic for proving that a bar today could do everything the legendary bars of the past could do. Years later, it's still doing that. Meanwhile, Pegu Club's bartenders have gone to every corner of America and opened their own bar, establishing the same thing over and over: Pegu was timeless when it opened, and it hasn't changed a bit. To sit there in the cool evening shadows sipping a Pegu Club Cocktail is to be drinking in 2006 or 1936 or 1916.

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